Sinnerman (7 page)

It didn’t take long for Sam to notice someone else who would. A woman, with the looks of a young girl still in college, sat alone on a bench with a book in her hand and headphones in her ears. She read in silence, unaware of the element of danger that existed around her. Sam took refuge under a majestic oak tree and pulled a weathered and worn paperback book out of his pocket and pretended to read it. He waited for the sun, and after a time it lowered itself behind the mountain and produced a glare on the woman like a spotlight which lit her up like the soft glow that protruded from a lighthouse. Sam’s heart skipped a couple beats. She was the one.

Thirty minutes went by, but the park was still occupied by four visitors. With every moment that ticked by, Sam’s appetite to claim his prize grew more insatiable, but he knew if he persisted that in time it would pay off. And ten minutes later it did. There were only two people left in the park now, himself and the gorgeous brunette on the bench. And soon there would be none.

The next day I sat at my desk at my office. My eyes bored into the business card I held in my hand. It didn’t contain a name or an address or the title of a business even. In fact, there was only one thing on it: a phone number. The card had been given to me several months back by a man named Giovanni Luciana. I’d helped his sister out of a bad situation and he’d tracked me down and offered me his card in case I ever needed him for anything—like some sort of you helped me so now I need to return the favor kind of thing, but I knew nothing about the man except how I felt when we first met. There was something about him that was unique; he was different than other men I’d been around in the past, and in the brief moments we spent together he had a big impact on me; there was a certain magnetism between us that pulled us together. My emotions at the time of our quick rendezvous had been a mix of nervousness and some kind of strange attraction. Or maybe I was beguiled by him, but I didn’t know why. Whatever it was, part of me wanted to run that day and get far away from him, but there was another side of me that was curious and hoped I’d find a reason to see him again one day.

I dialed the number listed on the center of the card into my cell phone and waited. It rang once and then a second time, and then my office door opened and Maddie sauntered in. She plopped down on the chair across from mine and gawked at me.

“So why’d you call me down here then?” she said.

I hit the end call button on the phone and met her gaze. Maybe it was a sign, and I didn’t need his help after all.

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” I said, “but first I want to know more about the finger.”

“Well, he did a good job of preserving it. The liquid in the jar he gave you was ethyl alcohol. The tissue in the finger hadn’t disintegrated much at all over time, and it was intact enough that we were able to run some tests.”

“And you’re sure it was Gabby’s?” I said.

She nodded.

“There’s no doubt about it Sloane, I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. He’s just trying to unnerve me.”

“Yeah well, whoever he is, he’s twisted,” she said.

“I’ll be fine. Besides, I have Taye Diggs, and I’m sure he won’t let anything happen to me.”

She crossed her arms and leaned back.

“If you say so,” she said. “But I know how you work. You take risks, and this might be one of those times you might want to consider your safety for a change.”

“So listen,” I said. “You know I’d do anything to catch this guy, right?”

“I don’t think there’s a person around here that isn’t aware of that fact,” she said.

“I want to show you something, but it’s in the vault.”

There was a twinkle in eye like I’d just given her the keys to the Magic Kingdom.

“Sweet!” she said. “Are we talking covert operations here? If so, I’m in.”

“Were talking I-don’t-want-the-chief-to-know-anything-about-it here.”

“Even better. Now I have to know,” she said.

“And you won’t say anything to anyone, right?”

“Sloane,” she said. “Wouldn’t you agree that we’re past that point in our relationship? I mean, men are fabulous to have around and they have their moments, I’m sure most women would agree. But to have a girlfriend who has your back no matter what—no guy is worth that.”

I stood up and walked over to a watercolor painting that hung on my wall. It was large, about the size of a sixty-inch flat-screen TV, and the perfect decoy.

“You called me here to discuss a painting?’ she said. “Let me guess, the artist placed something in the background, a hidden clue of some kind, like those weirded-out pictures people used to hang in their bathrooms or in the foyer, and you can’t decipher what it is which has driven you bonkers, so you called me here to figure it out for you.”

We both laughed.

I shifted my body weight to the right and looked around the corner at Taye Diggs. He manned his post outside, oblivious to the girl talk, which was just how I wanted it to be. When I was sure his eyes were focused in a different direction, I lifted the painting from its position on the wall.

“Holy crap!” Maddie said.

I smiled.

“I don’t think obsession is the right word to describe what I’m seeing here,” she said.

Behind the painting on the wall was an oversized peg board about the same height and width as the TV, and on it was every piece of information I’d come across that related to the Sinnerman murders. There were photos of his female victims, newspaper clippings I’d saved, his killing timeline, a profile I’d created on him, and anything else I felt was relevant to the case.

Maddie sprung from her chair to get a closer look.

“How long have you had this here?” she said.

“I started to piece it together bit by bit a few months after Gabby died.”

“This is, like—amazing,” she said. “I bet you have more information here than anyone else on this case.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said. “I haven’t been able to get my hands on most of the evidence, not even to copy it, but I did the best I could with what I had access to.”

“I’ll say,” she said. “Nick know about this?”

I shook my head.

“No one does,” I said.

Maddie zeroed in on a white piece of lined paper I’d tacked to the wall with the killer’s criminal profile on it.

“May I?” she said.

“Go right ahead. It isn’t the same one the cops have though—I came up with it on my own.

She lifted the page from the board and read it out loud.

SINNERMAN PROFILE

MALE, AGE 35-45

METHODICAL AND ORGANIZED

SOCIOPATH

KILLS FOR POWER, POSSESSION???

ABUSED OR POSSIBLY NEGLECTED OR ABANDONED BY A PARENT

INTELLIGENT, HIGH IQ

CHOOSES WOMEN OF SAME APPROXMIATE AGE, WEIGHT, HAIR COLOR

Maddie stopped about a quarter of the way through the list and said, “You forgot to add sick lunatic whacko, but other than that, you seem to have a good grip on this guy.”

“If it’s all accurate.”

“Oh come on, we both know you have a gift for this kind of thing. I’d be willing to bet you’re about ninety-five percent on target with all this.”

“The reason I wanted you to see this is because this time I want to be kept in the loop. With his last series of killings I couldn’t deal with it, and you and everyone else kept mum.”

“We were just trying to help you get through your loss,” she said, “and giving you all the details back then wouldn’t have been the right thing to do. We all knew that.”

“And I agree, but this isn’t some kind of blood pact you made with each other where you’re obligated to a vow of silence—things are different now. I know you have access to a lot of information, and I want you to share it with me.”

I stared her right in the eye and tried to gauge her reaction. She cocked her head to one side like she had taken it all in and then said, “Fine by me.”

“I bet the chief is going to tell you things too since the two of you are together now. You are still an item, right?”

“Item is taking it a bit far,” she said. “You know how I roll. I just go with it, but I never define it.”

Maddie didn’t like to get too committed to her men. It made her feel like she did when she was in high school and her mother strapped her down at home with all her siblings and she missed out on all the things most teens experience at that time of their life. Her preferred method of dating only worked if it was done on her own terms, which was why it surprised me that she agreed to date the chief in the first place.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll tell you as much as I can. But I want you to do something for me in return.”

“Anything.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“Always.”

“I mean it, Sloane. I worry about you,” she said.

Maddie’s cell phone rang.

“How’s it going, babe?” she said into the receiver.

“You’re calling him babe now?” I whispered loud enough for only her to hear. “When did that happen?”

She grinned and shushed me with her finger, but within a few seconds, the look of glee on her face turned to genuine concern, and she ended the call without another word.

“What is it?”

“Sinnerman’s killed again,” she said.

I grabbed my keys from the top of my desk. “I’ll drive.”

The body had been disposed of in the center of the track at the city park. I was thankful when I looked around and noted that Nick and Coop weren’t there yet. A mass of spectators had gathered behind the thin plastic roped-off section of police tape.

Maddie stepped inside the perimeter and flashed her credentials to a male officer I didn’t recognize.

“And who’s this?” he said and thumbed in my direction.

“She’s with me,” Maddie said.

He shifted his attention from her to me.

“Where’s your ID lady?” he said.

“Look,” Maddie interjected, “we just came from lunch, and it’s not like I had the time to swing by my office so she could grab it. It seemed more important to me at the time that we get here as soon as possible, so why don’t you lay off and let us do our job.”

He didn’t seem to know what to say to that and let us pass. It didn’t buy me a lot of time, but it bought me a little, and I was determined to make every second count. I glanced back at Taye Diggs who shook his head but didn’t try to stop me.

Maddie approached a young male who was hunched over the dead woman’s body collecting various tidbits of evidence.

“What do you got for me?” she said.

“From what I can tell, the victim appears to have been killed less than twenty-four hours ago, and it looks like her wounds are an identical match to the woman that was killed the other day. Everything matches up except the number of lacerations to her thigh.”

I leaned in and counted them. There were five this time.

“Do we have a name?” Maddie said.

“She had an ID card from a university not far from here in her back pocket. Her name is Sasha Winters.”

“She looks a little old to be a university student.”

A car drove up and parked and out stepped public enemy number one and two.

“Uh-oh,” Maddie said. “Get ready for an ass-chewing sandwich.”

I retrieved my cell phone from my pocket with haste and snapped some photos of the victim and the crime scene and then slid it back into my pocket.

“Why is it that wherever I go, you seem to follow?” Coop said.

“I was with Maddie when she got the call.”

“And that makes it alright?” he said.

“It makes it the truth.”

“Here’s some truth for you—I want you out of here. Now.”

I looked over at Nick whose crossed arms told me all I needed to know about where he stood in all of it, and then I turned toward Maddie.

“I’ll catch a ride back to my lab with one of my guys,” she said. “You go on.”

“Call me later?” I said.

She smiled and nodded.

Coop frowned and Maddie gave him a hard stare and then looked back and me and said, “You bet I will.”

The next morning I reappeared at the crime scene, but the difference was the body wasn’t there and everything had been cleaned up and life at the park was back to usual. It was hard to tell anything happened there at all. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for or why anything of any significance would have been left behind, but I wanted to explore the area anyway. It was of particular interest to me that the killer dropped his bodies off in the same place he picked them up. He was bold, and had one mad pair of cojones. That much I knew.

Maddie called me the night before with some privileged information she’d been given about the victim. The girl had gone to the park the night before to study, like she often did during the week. Her mother told the police that there was a specific bench she liked to sit on so they dusted it for prints, but I knew Sinnerman’s wouldn’t be among them. I sat on the bench and scanned the area and wondered if he watched her and for how long. I envisioned him hunkered down somewhere while he watched and waited, and I searched around to see if I could find the most likely spot. Some nine or so yards away, the leaves on a lofty oak tree sprawled out in all directions across a pale blue sky. It was the only one of its kind in the immediate area and the perfect place to disguise oneself.

I approached the tree and crouched down and scanned the ground that surrounded me. There were no footprints, but there was a patch of dirt that appeared to have been smoothed over by something, like it didn’t belong with the sediment around it. In my stooped position, I had a clear view of the bench. I stayed there for a few minutes and absorbed the scene and then withdrew my phone from my pocket and took a picture of it. I didn’t know why; it just seemed like it was the right thing to do. I tilted the lens downward and zoomed in and snapped a photo of the disheveled patch of the dirt. The more I looked at it, the more I noticed something odd. The dirt around it was undisturbed and looked like it had been for quite some time.